The Golden Legend Wiki
The Golden Legend is a fictional book set in Zamana, a fictional city, in contemporary Pakistan. Through the lives of the characters; a Muslim widow; and her Christian ex-servants and protegee, the author; Nadeem Aslam; shows what life is like in modern day Pakistan. Author- Nadeem Aslam Genre- Domestic Fiction Publication Date- 3 January 2017 'Reviews for The Golden Legend-' https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/19/books/review/the-golden-legend-by-nadeem-aslam.html https://www.thecommononline.org/review-the-golden-legend/ https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2017/05/29/nadeem-aslam-the-golden-legend/ The Golden Legend- A Summary Nargis, an architect with a dark secret, has lost her husband, Massud, to a rogue American bullet. It hit him as he stepped outside a human chain passing books to a new library that he and Nargis designed. This book had been written by his father and was named "That They Might Know Each Other" ''which detailed how no culture is pure as all cultures interacted with one another at some point. Soon, this leads to her being tangled with the military intelligence agency and the plot of the novels thickens and weaves together just like the repairs of ''That They Might Know Each Other" ''which was damaged to terrify Nargis into compiling with the agency's wishes. Nargis and Masud's'' Christian ex-servant, Lily, and his daughter, Helen, whom Nargis and Massud have nurtured intellectually and whose mother Grace, was murdered by a Muslim, live nearby. Disaster erupts when Lily's affair with Ayesha, the Muslim widow of a militant Islamist martyr, is revealed. A mob burns down their neighbourhood. Both Lily and Helen have to escape as people wanted to kill Lily, and Helen was about to be arrested on accusations of blasphemy. Nargis escapes with Helen, who falls in love with a Kashmiri named Imran, who turns up at Nargis’s house one day after having attempted to help save Masud's life and having escaped from a group of jihadists with whom he trained. Nargis, Helen, and Imran begin a strange but lovely idyll of love and friendship that sharply contrasts with the fears and violence that surrounds them. Hidden, the three lovingly repair Massud’s father book, using golden thread to stitch its pages together again. Each of these characters suffers as a result of bigotry that fueled the violence in their country. Pakistan depicted in this harrowing novel is unbearably wrenched apart by terror and prejudice, but the dignity of Aslam’s characters and their devotion to one another rises far above the violence in the end as realism and fable combine to show patriotism, violence, religious identity, the beauty and pain, and the creation and destruction that one finds in Pakistan. About the author- Nadeem Aslam "I wanted every chapter of Maps for Lost Lovers to be like a Persian miniature. In these miniatures, a small piece of paper – no bigger than a sheet of A4 – holds an immense wealth of beauty, colour and detail. Trees have leaves each perfectly rendered. Flowers are moments old and the tilework of the palaces and mosques is lovingly detailed. That was the aim in Maps..." - Nadeem Aslam on his second novel Maps for Lost Lovers Nadeem Aslam, born in Pakistan in 1966, moved to the United Kingdom as a teenager. His family settled in Huddersfield and he studied biochemistry at the University of Manchester. However, eventually, he left to become a writer, often using his own experiences in his work. His first novel, Season of the Rainbirds (1993), won a Betty Trask Award and the Authors’ Club First Novel Award. In the opening pages of the novel, the author depicts a domestic scene through the collective consciousness of an anonymous group of children in a tiny town in Pakistan. This world has an innocence and simplicity about it which is, quite literally in places, black and white: "Men with black beards are to be avoided, while those with white beards are kind and gentle". Yet what strikes the reader most is the overwhelming attention to detail in these intricate, delicate paragraphs: something that is a speciality of Aslam. Aslam’s second novel, Maps for Lost Lovers (2004), received critical acclaim and one critic in The Observer noted: "This is that rare sort of book that gives a voice to those whose voices are seldom heard." In Maps for Lost Lovers (2004), he depicts "a time in England when the white attitude towards dark-skinned foreigners was just beginning to go from I don’t want to see them or work next to them to I don’t mind working next to them if I’m forced to, as long as I don’t have to speak to them, an attitude that would change in another ten years to I don’t mind them socializing in the same place as me if they must, as long as I don’t have to live next to them." This level of intricacy and nuance took eleven years to perfect and Dr James Procter observed that "in a period when so many contemporary writers are associated with the cult of celebrity, with instanteous success and with hasty, not to mention hefty, advances, Aslam seems content with the longer view, and with quality rather than quantity." Now Nadeem Aslam lives in London. His third novel The Wasted Vigil was published in 2008, its title derived from a painting with the same title by a Pakistani artist, followed by a fourth book, The Blind Man's Garden, in 2013. He published Golden Legend in 2017. Major Themes in the Novel Latest activity Photos and videos are a great way to add visuals to your wiki. Add one below! Category:Browse